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„Yat took Laban’s notation into acting. We studied movement psychology and its notation. We didn’t use the notation particularly, but the notation is based on principles of putting psychological concepts into space, into action, into the physical world…“–Colin Firth – On Yat Malmgren, London; Quelle: Backstage

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„So, what it came down was the fact that I have to find an essence, as one would do with any character, to find the humanessence of this person, and then hang his nuances, his movements, his characteristics on that central issue,…“ –Tom Hardy – Character Work-Character Analysis; Quelle: IGN Autor Steve Head

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„There’s something that Michael Fassbender does in „12 Years a Slave“ that reveals the nature of his character, the unstable, probably psychotic plantation owner Edwin Epps, which wasn’t on the page. Every time Epps is around one of his slaves, he’s touching them—hooking his arm around the neck of Solomon Northup as if the two of them were best buds, or propping his arm atop another’s head, as if it were a fencepost. The gestures seem casual on the surface, even friendly, but because he is the master and they are slaves, it’s something more threatening and contemptuous, erasing the notion of personal space. „It’s the difference between me sitting here,“ Fassbender said, and then to demonstrate, abruptly moving his position on the couch so that our faces were practically touching, „and me sittinghere. It changes the dynamic immediately. It’s his space. He owns it. And he owns them. That’s the way he sees it.““–Michael Fassbender; Character Analysis & Character Movement; Quelle: Indiewire/ The Playlist

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Othello
„Tragic heroes always have to have weight. If you want to play „Othello“. How to yourecognize if you´re pride as a man is totally destroyed?“

Woyzeck
„The gifts of Woyzeck are very visual, more intuiting then thinking.“

Jago
„Jago. He hears the word honest. He intuitively picks it up. Like „Red Light Goes On“. Jago trusts in his intuition and knows what to do.“

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Hamlet

Hamlet
-„When it´s a matter of life or death we/he opens up to the situation.“
-„When you have a big capacity for love and you get betrayed what happens then?
-„Hamlet is deep down shy. He finds it absolutely hard to be open and free with someone else even with Horatio.“
-„Shyness affects your dealing with everything.“

„Characters have an essence and a variety of inner and outer qualities. Even when he/Hamlet was not melancholic or depressed before, he was always highly sensitive.“

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Physical = Emotions:

„When someone leans forward- you know something is going to happen.“
„Open up my arms to you. You know I open up to you – emotionally.“„Actors try to express their feelings. But normal people don´t do that, they do things. Choose the right restaurant, the right present and that might make them feel nervous.“

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Michael Fassbender: „It’s always important for me to establish a physical life for the character—how the character moves, what sort of shoes he wears, what props he surrounds himself with, how he smokes his pipe, all those sorts of things. Bringing the physicality to [Carl Jung] was part of the fun of it, and at the beginning of the film, especially, I wanted to show someone who was young, enthusiastic, determined, ambitious, and yet insecure at some level and needing to prove himself. He hadn’t yet felt confident in his achievements at that point. And then we see him go through his mental breakdown and start to discard the disciplines of the world that he’s come from. Those various stages of life are what I wanted to represent as much as possible with the physical form. That was always in the front of my mind…. I wanted to do that to show that he is someone who’s also very sensual, and somebody that is, in some ways, dominated by the flesh, so there’s a weakness there, and a weakness when it comes to Sabina Spielrein. He’s somebody who likes to consume things. He enjoys life and enjoys beautiful things. Freud is more controlled in the way he eats, and he notices the large portions Jung intakes. It was an idea that there’s a contrasting passion there within the man, and a sensuality.

S: Are you a lot like that?

Michael Fassbender: … It’s weird, because at the school that I went to [Drama Centre London], we dealt very much in character types, which is actually a very Jungian type of teaching. We discussed how there are „near“ characters in life—people that are sort of blinkered by their environments or what they’ve been taught. People that are homophobic, for example, would be „near“ personalities. Then you have a „stable“ personality, which would be more like a politician or a school teacher, and a „adream“ personality, who can be self-obsessed or self-indulgent to a certain extent, and who, as „dream“ suggests, isn’t totally hooked in to the real normality that everyone else is living in. Within that, you have feeling-sensing, and sensing-feeling, and I think my senses come before my emotions.“ – Interview mit Michael Fassbender; Character Types und Character Analysis; (Quelle: Slant Film Magazine)

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Julius Caesar:

„Recently, I watched Anthony Hopkins teach a pair of young professional Actors doing act Ⅰ, scene 2 of Julius Caesar. They understood the ambitions at play in the scene, but Hopkins reminded the Cassius and Brutus that this was not the Forum in the eternal summer of Hollywood epics, but that (backing up from the Ides of March) the chilling winds of winter blew across the open square. Hopkins whispered, „Seig heil! Seig heil! Seig heil! evoking the crowd´s deafening support for Caesar, which resonated with the rise of another tyrant whose threat Hopkins knew from his own youthful experience. Hopkins stepped back to make associations between his own world and Brutus´s that were rooted in the text, two crystal-clear examples of constructive imagination.“ – InDreamwork For Actors by Janet Sonenberg